EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2021

Mars, Ahoy!

Feb. 18 , 2021 (EIRNS)—The United States’ Mars lander Perseverance successfully touched down on Mars today at 3:56 p.m. EST, as the Mars spacecraft from China and the United Arab Emirates, which had arrived just days earlier, orbited the planet. It’s hard to conceive of a better image of the one humanity embarked on a common mission which speaks to the essence of Man’s role in the universe: Hope, Questions to the Universe, and Perseverance.

In her weekly strategic webcast yesterday, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke of this mission: “This is the future, and if mankind is supposed to live as an immortal species—and that was a notion which was coined by my late husband—because we are different from other species, because we have creative reason. We can solve any problem through scientific and technological breakthroughs, by discovering new laws of the universe. And since our mind is the most advanced part of that universe, there is all the reason for optimism that once we attune our own existence and our own practice with the laws of the universe, our chances to become the immortal species is absolutely there. But it does require space travel as a precondition, and I think this idea of nations working together to discover the beautiful secrets of the universe, that gives you a taste of what the future of man can look like, when we decide to become adults.”

In your mind’s eye, contrast that image of Man as a creative, spacefaring species, with the image that has led to the current plummeting potential relative population density across the trans-Atlantic region, with all of its consequences: a planetary pandemic; forever wars and the risk of nuclear conflagration; mass unemployment and desperate waves of migration; and now a dramatic drop in the average life expectancy in the United States itself. According to a new study issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the first six months of 2020 alone, average life expectancy dropped by a full year: from 78.8 in 2019, to 77.8 through June 2020. That is the single largest drop since World War II, and reflects both the direct and indirect impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. and internationally.

The point is straightforward: It’s the physical economy, stupid!

And the essence of human physical economy is limitless breakthroughs in fundamental science and classical culture, of the sort portended by Man’s Mission to Mars. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche put it in her latest webcast: “At this point, the only voice of reason is really coming from The LaRouche Organization and the policies promoted by my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche. But it needs a broad mobilization of the population to change the course of these developments.”